Resource exploitation and energy infrastructures do profoundly transform spaces and spatial experiences. This concerns not only the geopolitical zoning of areas with regard to their raw material deposits and the territorial markings of “resource nationalism” (Koch/Perreault 2019). It also involves the relationship between centers, where resource revenues mostly flow, and the peripheries, where the extraction, processing, and transport of resources are mostly located. And it deeply affects the consequences for the habitability and livability of spaces as much as the perception of a space crisscrossed by cables, rays, pipelines, routes, wind turbines, oil rigs, cooling towers and other forms of energy architectures. 

The workshop will examine the transformation of spaces through resourcification and energy infrastructure projects, with a specific focus on pipelines and the German landing stations of two major East-West pipelines. Even though pipelines – especially transregional pipelines – cover an enormous space, the public tends to ignore them until their smooth operation is disrupted. Thus, they remain not only literally buried in the ground or at the bottom of the sea, but also conceptually “hidden in plain sight” (Wilson/Carson/Szeman 2017: 5), along with the raw materials they transport. This blindness to the infrastructure of resource transport goes hand in hand with a neglect of the spaces through which this transport takes place. They are territories of passage, energetic transit zones, an unmarked “space of flows” that is reduced to its function as a transit corridor under the primacy of “moving along” (Ghosn 2016: 166). The workshop aims to shed light on these concealed spaces by focusing on two border locations. In addition to a kick-off and closing event in Berlin, the workshop will take place in Schwedt (landing point of the northern branch of the Družba oil pipeline and location of the PCK oil refinery) and Lubmin/Greifswald (landing point of the Nord Stream pipelines, location of the last nuclear power plant in the GDR and, since 2024, LNG terminal).

Participants

Lucie Česàlkovà (Charles University Prague) 

Gabriyel Dari (Zurich) 

Nikolay Erofeev (Freie Universität Berlin)

Bilge Firat (University of Texas at El Paso)

Per Högselius (KTH Stockholm)

Ksenia Litvinenko (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Berlin)

Lea Nienhoff (University of Basel)

Leyla Sayfutdinova (University of Glasgow)

Mathilde Stangenberger (Freie Universität Berlin)

Susanne Strätling (Freie Universität Berlin)